Smart vehicles are becoming a reality and motorcycles are no exception; Yamaha now allows you to communicate with your bike

If your motorcycle could talk, what would it say? I mean besides scolding you for dropping it that time two years ago when you dented the gas tank. “Communicating” with your motorcycle nowadays is straightforward: twist the throttle to tell it to go faster, lean in to tell it to turn and hit the brake lever to tell it to stop. When there’s a problem, you roll your sleeves and start tinkering to figure out what’s wrong. Now though, communication between ride and rider is about to get a whole lot more elaborate.

Yamaha now allows you to “talk” with your YZ450F dirt bike thanks to the Power Tuner Smartphone app available on Apple and Android. With the app, you can pair your mobile phone with the motorcycle’s Communication Control Unit (CCU) which will provide the most performance-driven among us with precious data.

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I personally like to press the starter, release the clutch, and get rolling, but some of us like to see what their motorcycle is capable of. The Power Tuner app allows you to track lap times, monitor your racing metrics, push scheduled maintenance notifications, and even schedule the engine to shut down after a certain period of inactivity.

That’s not all the app does, either. It also allows you to, well, tinker with the motorcycle. Are you attacking the dirt hills and think your YZ can do better? Pull over, fire up the app, and start tuning away. You can now optimize all kinds of things like ignition and injection timings, adjust throttle input versus rpm, etcetera. In all there are 16 points of adjustment that can be toyed with on a screen that resembles a complicated, real-life video game.

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Reap the benefits of your personalized map—or learn the hard way what works and doesn’t. If you’re new at this and feel like you might have messed up, the pre-mapped reset will erase any mistake and restore the motorcycle to its original settings.

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The integration of the application comes with the model’s complete overhaul for 2018. The YZ450F now has on-board WiFi capability, which allows you to log in and tune its performance from virtually anywhere. For myself, I’ll stick to the good old fashion way of doing things on two wheels and leave the tech toys to the kids.

Source: Motorcycle.com

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